Preserving the Digital World

J. Willard Marriott Library. Digital Preservation. www.lib.utah.edu

Preserving digital materials can be extremely difficult. After all, digital materials face a number of threats. Unlike physical materials, digital materials rely on (among other things) a purely digital interface in order to be accessible and useful. So what happens when these "environments" become obsolete? How many of us have floppy disks sitting in cardboard boxes today, with nothing capable of actually reading them? This is the problem faced by digital preservationists, and it is a problem digital historians must face as well. As Wikipedia aptly states: "The goal of digital preservation is the accurate rendering of authenticated content over time." Making sure documents, videos, and other digital media are viable in the future is of utmost importance for future research possibilities.

Science Daily's article "'Digital Dark Age' May Doom Some Data" brings up a good point: with software advancing so rapidly, there is a lot of important content getting left behind, and the problem is only going to get worse. One prime example the article gives NASA's Viking mission to Mars in 1976. Today, a portion of the data gathered from the mission is "unreadable and lost forever." Something as historically important as the Viking mission should not be lost to the sands of time - and this is just one example!

Digital preservation is also important for a number of reasons besides historical significance. Digital Preservation Europe (DPE) has a list of reasons digital preservation is necessary, including legal (business records required by law, for example) and financial reasons (to prove intellectual property and secure profit from such property). Conrad De Aenlle believes that there will be a growing need for professional preservationists in the future, and I tend to agree with him. The numerous benefits of preserving digital materials far out-weigh the cost of hiring professionals and maintaining software, hardware, etc.

The research group known as FANG (Finding Aids Next Generation) took it upon themselves to not only preserve historical documents via digital medium, but also make it accessible and useful to researchers. The Polar Bear Expedition Digital Collections was born from their effort. Magia Ghetu Krause and Elizabeth Yakel explain here that the project aimed to discover if "social navigation tools" could streamline the accessibility and usefulness of a digital archive. Users could set up personal accounts on the site and interact with each other as well as with the site itself with by posting comments. FANG discovered that their users were very helpful in spotting mistakes and helping to make corrections. Krause and Yakel write that they were "encouraged" by the project's outcome. However, when I visited the site I was not thoroughly impressed. After browsing through (at random) Edwin L. Arkins diary and scrapbook I found the site to be a bit clunky and not very useful. The images of the diary were illegible and there was no text version to make any sense of it. Also, to get to the images I followed two or three links after the main search query. And, to top it off, when I tried to return to my search results an error message appeared.

Regardless of the accessibility issues of the Polar Bear project, FANG has the right idea. It takes a lot of work to come up with a way of dealing with the particularly infinite problems faced by digital preservationists. However, this is no excuse to give up and go home. Digital preservation is frustrating, but necessary. With continued experimentation and creativity, preservationists will find solutions and protect our delicate digital materials for generations to come.

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